


why, this is hell (nor am I out of it)

by kangeiko



Series: pyrrhic victories (things better left unsaid) [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Dark Tony Stark, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Obsession, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Sleep Deprivation, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 23:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13669833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/pseuds/kangeiko
Summary: Tony is perfectly fine. He just needs to be left alone to get through this one little problem.





	why, this is hell (nor am I out of it)

**Author's Note:**

> I don't quite know where this came from. No, I lie, I was reading comicverse dark!Steve fics and thought that a dark!Tony (be it movieverse or comicverse) was just as plausible a result out of his desire to protect those he loves. And that watching Tony break entirely and go full super-villain would be... interesting? Yeah, I don't know. Consider it exorcising some demons. Or just clearing my mental palate.
> 
> Please heed the tags.

_The difference between a drunk and an alcoholic is that, most of the time, the drunk is actually genuinely sorry._

(Tony is not a drunk.)

*

He moved into the R&D levels almost immediately. Hell, it was his compound, right? The rest of them could just figure out a different place to run their carefully controlled experiments; the R&D levels were _his._

“Well, this is creepy and not at all mad scientist-y,” Barton said from his perch atop a cabinet.

Tony hadn’t even noticed him come in. “What do you want?”

Barton smiled his thin smile, the same one he’d offered everyone since they’d come back to the US. “Bruce wants to know if you’re joining us for dinner. And so does Steve. Only he didn’t ask. I could just tell.” He pointed two fingers at his eyes, and then pointed them at Tony in the universal sign for ‘eagle-eyed.’

For one brief moment, Tony considered it. But he’d made close to no progress over the last week, and what with all the ridiculous team-building sessions they’d been on, he’d hardly had any time to himself. Anyway, it’s not like they _needed_ team-building sessions; the team had already been built, right? It was a shame it had all turned into a trashfire shitshow, but them’s the breaks, sometimes.

“Busy,” he decided at last, and pried off the suit’s chest-plate.

*

Vision came by the next morning to inquire if Mr Stark would like to, yadda yadda yadda. It was a little strange telling Vision he was busy, when Vision could clearly see it himself, but Tony persevered. It was important for his babies to learn.

*

Romanoff sat by his side and watched him work all evening.

*

Cap came down two nights after that. (Tony had already sent Rhodey away, as his honeybear needed his rest.) 

“Hey. You busy?”

Tony looked up from his work. He gestured around at the dismantled suit. “What gave it away?”

Cap fidgeted for a moment, then straightened his spine. “I… I was wondering if you’d like to join me for lunch.”

Tony looked back down at his work, his shoulders hunching. “No thanks.”

*

He wasn’t even surprised when he looked up see Bruce walk in. “So, who called you?”

Bruce frowned at him. “No one called me.”

Tony put down the welding torch and flipped up the mask. “Yeah, no. You haven’t been down here since you came back to Earth and moved in. Someone called you.”

“No one called me, Tony. I decided I didn’t want to be a coward. I want to talk.”

Tony looked at him for long moment before pulling the mask back down and turning away. “I don’t.”

*

Natasha didn’t bother to announce herself when she returned, he just woke up one morning on the cot in his workshop to find her sitting on one of the worktables, watching him sleep.

“You know that’s fucking creepy, right? Normal people don’t go all _Twilight_ on their landlord.” He rolled to his feet and staggered towards the bathroom, grabbing his discarded hoodie on the way.

When he came back out, Natasha was gone.

*

The schematics were a mess. He doesn’t know what the hell he’d been thinking; there was nothing salvageable in there. He swore long and hard and dumped the file.

_Shit._

*

“Mister Stark?” Peter stuck his head around the door. “Mister Stark? Happy said that - oh. Hi.”

Tony looked up from the revised schematics. His nose itched, he realised belatedly, and he scrubbed a hand across his face, smearing grease over half of it. When had he managed to get engine grease on his hands?

“What’s up, kid?”

“Happy said that you were down here,” the kid said, inching his way into the workshop, his eyes round. “I was supposed to - are you ok?”

Tony paused in trying to scrub the grease off his face. “I’m fine, kid. What do you want?”

“I just thought… there’s a science project at school, and…”

He tuned the rest out, nodding occasionally. 

His face really fucking itched.

His hands, too.

*

Their first proper fight, and he was paired with Cap.

Their first improper fight, too. Their first sparring session. Their first meal. Their first handshake. 

Everywhere he looked, he couldn’t get away from the bastard.

“Tony,” Cap said, his voice soft, too soft, not Cap’s voice at all. “You ok?”

_I can do this all day._ “Peachy,” Tony said, and flipped down the face plate. Punching alien invaders, it turned out, wasn’t a skill he had lost.

*

“Are you coming up for food?” Barton said, leaning against the doorframe.

“No.”

Barton shrugged. “Your loss.”

It was another twenty minutes before Tony realised that he hadn’t actually left. “What?”

“Your shoulder,” Barton said, an odd note in his voice. He cleared his throat. “Ah, you’ve pulled some stitches.” He did turn away, then, waving a hand in a half-hearted goodbye.

Tony looked down, at the spread of red on white. Huh. He hadn’t noticed.

*

Barnes stayed away, and Tony was infinitely grateful for it. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if he’d turned around to see the fucking Winter Soldier lurking nearby. No, Barnes limited himself to his room and to the well-it common areas, and stayed far away from the R&D levels.

Now, if only other people could earn the same self-restraint, things would be a lot easier.

*

“OK, I wasn’t sure before, but I’m pretty sure now, and I don’t even know what to say, Tony. _You’re_ avoiding _me_?” Bruce dumped the full plate of saag aloo and heaped helpings of paneer on the worktable with a clatter. “Are you kidding me? You shack up with Ross, with _Ross_ , and -” he clamped his mouth shut, visibly evening out his breathing. “I know you had an endgame,” he said after a couple of minutes. “I know that. I - I’m trying to work through that, to get over it, to think about your endgame rather than your methods. I am. But where the hell do you get off on avoiding me?”

Tony looked up from the schematics, bewildered. The left boot repulsor was still lagging infinitesimally, and as it was identical to the right boot repulsor, the issue had to be with Tony’s stance, rather than the boots themselves. Surely. Surely? “What?” He asked vaguely. “Oh, is that for me? I’m not really hungry.” He looked back down at the schematics, frowning. Maybe if he -

The door slammed. That was odd; Tony didn’t generally have doors that people could slam. Huh.

Maybe he needed to look at the spine curvature. Didn’t it all come back to the spine in the end?

*

“Mr Stark. Your presence is requested upstairs. We are having a team dinner.”

Tony waved the familiar voice away. “Not now, JARVIS. I’m busy. Mute.”

*

Cap came down again, a little while later.

“Didn’t we agree that this was my area?” Tony asked, confused. “I stay out of your levels, you stay out of mine. Why are you here?”

Cap frowned at him. “Tony. I’ve been coming down here every day for the last three weeks.”

Well, that was neither here nor there. “That just makes it worse,” Tony muttered. He dug the heels of his hand into his eye sockets, groaning when his spine popped. He straightened abruptly after a moment as a thought arrive fully-formed. “Do your organs regenerate?”

Cap blinked at him. 

“Your organs. Do they regenerate? Because your scars heal, right? And some of them have been pretty deep. So, do they regenerate?”

“I… have no idea. Why, Tony?”

“I’m just thinking. Maybe we don’t need all of it? But, like, just the sacral region? You wouldn’t mind, right?”

Cap stared at him for a long moment. “Are… are you asking if you can cut out my _spine_?”

“No! Just a small part. You regenerate, right? Like a worm.” Tony’s fingers beat a tattoo on the worktable as he stared. “Well?”

“No, Tony,” Cap said slowly. “I don’t think I could grow back bits of my spine.”

Oh.

Tony looked down, deflated.

There was a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye and he flinched instinctively, raising his arms to protect his face.

Cap stopped, his hand still raised in offering. Coffee sloshed over the side of the mug he offered. After a moment, he carefully put the coffee mug down and stepped back. “Tony,” he said, his voice soft. “When was the last time you slept?”

*

Fury wanted to bench him. 

Tony doesn’t actually care about this because Fury is supposed to be dead, but somehow his opinion still carried weight; or so Barton said, anyway. “- so you better show up, is all I’m saying. Are you listening?”

“Not even a little,” Tony said, more to himself than to Barton.

There was a huffing sigh next to him, and then a little while later his coffee mug appeared to have filled up again.

Tony sipped his coffee and looked at the schematics. Maybe if he just… maybe stop trying to compensate for it, just start again? That’s what you did with malfunctioning parts, right? 

Maybe what he needed to do was work on the transplant option, rather than the prosthetic one. 

*

“Are you kidding me? Tony, _my God._ My God, Tony, what were you thinking?”

Tony scowled. “What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s…” Rhodey stared at him, his mouth hanging open. “I don’t even know where to start! But how about, _no one has ever done anything like this before!_ ”

“That’s what they said about hearts. And faces. And hands.”

“That’s not the same fucking thing. Hearts are not the same as a _spinal cord_!”

“Says you,” Tony said rudely, looking down at his proposal. He bit his lip. “You really don’t think it’ll work?”

“I think you’re an engineer, not a doctor,” Rhodey said, his voice unsteady. “Look. I appreciate this, I do. But you have to stop. You have to stop, Tony. I can’t - I can’t do this if you don’t stop.”

*

But the problem was -

The problem was.

*

“Iron Man! Are you OK?”

Tony swatted the annoying alien away, activating the unibeam when its big brother tried to eat him in retaliation. The tentacles around him loosened and he struggled out, shoving the suddenly slash flesh off him. His side ached with every breath; a sharp, prickling pain when he was still blossoming into a knifing jerk into his ribs when he inhaled. He knew this pain. (His ribs, he thought, and tried not to breathe too hard. His ribs.)

“Iron Man!” Cap sounded far away and close by all at once.

“‘M fine,” he slurred. 

The world tilted as he fell.

*

Someone was speaking to him. Someone he didn’t recognise.

“Go away,” he mumbled, trying to force air past his numb lips. “Fuck off.”

A hand patted his. It was all so far away from where he was, his limbs must have been miles long. “You weren’t kidding,” the voice said.

“... he’s been through a lot,” someone else said, someone a lot closer to Tony (or Tony’s head, which was where Tony was at the moment). A hand brushed Tony’s hair back from his face. “He needs to rest.”

“No,” Tony insisted, his throat parched, “I c’n do this all day,” and the hand stilled.

*

When he woke, it was to the sight of Wilson, of all people, at his bedside.

“Gonna tell me to fuck off again?” Wilson asked lightly. 

Tony huffed as much as his ribs permitted. “You deserved it.”

Wilson’s mouth thinned. “Are you planning to talk to anyone? Doesn’t have to be me. But everyone else has… we’re all dealing with it, except for you. You’ve been…”

Tony had a headache and he didn’t fucking _know_ Wilson. “Why are you here?” He interrupted, too loud, and fought the urge to clutch his aching ribs.

There was a long silence. “I drew the short straw,” Wilson said eventually.

Figured.

“That, and Steve hasn’t slept since you were brought in here,” he added.

Oh.

*

The thing about cracked ribs was that there wasn’t anything to be done with them. Once they had reinflated his lung and re-set the two broken ones, the rest of his joke of a ribcage was basically wrapped up in bandages and he was sent home on a wing and a prayer.

Some things, it turned out, only time could fix.

“This is a really shitty metaphor,” Tony informed Dummy irritably.

Dummy beeped at him, and nudged him with the kale smoothie.

“Yes, all right, fine.”

*

Pepper came to see him. This was great! He loved Pepper. He told her so, in long pornographic detail while she nodded. Eventually he ran out of words. “What was I saying?”

“That you’ll be on painkillers for a little while longer,” she said, unruffled. She presented him with a form and pointed at all the pages he needed to sign. “Here. And here.”

He looked a little closer. It was a patent on a prototype for a spinal cord transplant machine. Why would Pepper have that? “Am I supposed to be signing these while high? Obie used to make me do that a lot, I think.” 

Pep froze, all the blood draining from her face. “You asked for it,” she said unsteadily, “you called me, you asked me to come down here, you sent me the schematics, you asked me to register it and to contact Dr Cho. You - Tony, why did you ask me to arrange this if you were too medicated to function?”

“No, it’s fine.” He hurriedly scribbled his name at the bottom. “Besides,” he said, trying for levity, “if you try to kill me, that would make it the trifecta, right? No one could screw up that badly that many times.”

When he looked up from the form, she was gone. He blinked, puzzled. “Pep?” 

Her heels clicked in the hallway, rapidly moving away, and he heard one explosive sob before the door swooshed closed in her wake.

*

Cap came to visit him. He waited in the little living room rather than venturing into the bedroom, after that one unfortunate incident where Tony had woken up to see Captain America looming over him, his chest aching, and had managed to fall straight out of bed.

(Note: falling out of bed with broken and cracked ribs _hurt_.)

“You know, you could just _not_ ,” he suggested one day.

Cap set his jaw. “I’d like us to try.”

_Do or do not. There is no try._

Tony’s brain was a weird place, sometimes.

*

Vision had helpfully stopped visiting. Tony sort of missed him, and was also sort of glad. When he was deep into his design mode, it was disorienting to hear JARVIS in his ear again. It was easier to just not have him there at all, than to lose him all over again each time Tony looked up.

*

“Iron Man, break off! Tony!”

Iron Man did not break off. Bad Iron Man. No biscuit.

“Suck it,” Tony muttered, and turned the unibeam on. The Hydra goon didn’t so much disintegrate as just suddenly his body terminated a couple of inches above his hips.

The remains of the body thudded to the ground. The detonator - which had been in the goon’s hand - did not survive the unibeam either. The bombs did not go off.

The city was saved, huzzah! 

(His ribs fucking ached.)

“Hey, anyone hungry? I could really murder some shawarma right now.”

*

“You can’t do that!” Cap raged, stalking up and down the room. He had his cowl off but was otherwise still in his costume. “Jesus, Tony!”

Barnes sat quietly in a corner. He still hadn’t spoken to Tony. It was almost six months. Tony had never been more pleased about anything in his entire life.

“Sure I can,” Tony said, his voice perfect and true to life, even relayed through the comms channel. His face plate was down. “I can do this all day.” His head felt fuzzy, his ribs one giant throbbing bruise. He couldn’t quite remember why that phrase felt like jabbing his tongue into a rotten tooth; the ache agonising and familiar and addictive.

“Would you just - stop!” Cap wheeled to face him. Tony was surprised to see the wetness in his eyes, to hear the tremble of his voice. “Stop - just, stop.”

Tony considered. _Jab jab jab._ “No.”

*

Maximoff said nothing when she came down to the workshop a week later. Everyone else had stayed away, and even Rhodey had been sporadic in his visits. Tony didn’t mind; he preferred having some time to focus.

She watched him for some time, her brows drawn together in what seemed to be concern. (He knew better.) Eventually, she spoke. “You are not well,” she said.

Tony didn’t look at her. “I really don’t care what you think.”

She waited, her arms folded. After some time, she turned away.

*

The problem with a rotten tooth was that the more you jabbed at it, the harder it became to stop.

The easiest thing would have been for Cap to stop coming down. That might even have worked, Tony thought, if the issue was Cap. But the issue wasn’t Cap. The issue was that the prototype didn’t fucking _work._ Sure, it would be able to transplant the cord. _Sure._ Assuming that they could extract it from a donor without destroying it; and assuming that they could remove the damaged one from the recipient without killing them. 

At the end of the day, his shiny new transplant machine was just a glorified morgue locker.

*

“I don’t think mechanical intervention is the correct route,” Dr Cho said. She frowned at him through the screen. “Tony - are you OK? You look like you’ve lost quite a bit of weight.”

“New diet,” he told her airily. “So, listen, can we then talk biomechanics? Because I can keep the cord alive if you can get it into the patient.”

“And getting it out of the donor?”

He waved a hand. “Let’s take it one step at a time.”

*

Dr Cho called him the next morning. She’d had an idea she wanted to discuss overnight. She thought they might be able to reduce the risk of rejection. 

It was all purely hypothetical, of course. Because they’d have to get a live cord out first.

*

Cap came to see him a few weeks later. “Come for lunch with me.”

Tony looked up from his tablet. “Why?”

“Because,” Cap said. “I’m worried. Because you’ve been locked away for months, Tony, and you won’t see anyone. You nearly died out there, and you didn’t even notice! Because I’m worried about you. Because I care about you.” He swallowed. “Because we’re friends.”

He looked back up at that and met Cap’s clear blue gaze. There were shadows under Cap’s eyes. He must have really not been sleeping at all if he was showing the strain, Tony thought. 

The helix on his tablet kept blinking at him and he looked back down again. The problem was how to get a live cord out of the donor. Maybe they could try growing it using the cradle, or with stem cells, Dr Cho said. She’d thought it was all very promising.

“Tony?”

_So was I._

“... sure,” Tony said slowly. “Why not.”

*

fin

**Author's Note:**

> Let's pretend they just go for lunch and Steve convinces Tony to get some sleep? Let's... let's just go with that.


End file.
